At present, military rifles are issued with metal reusable magazines. While the magazines are designed to be reloaded and used many times, this is usually not practical in a combat situation. A GI normally carries seven or eight loaded magazines in combat. During an assault it is much easier to simply discard the empty magazines and insert another loaded one. While this is fast and efficient for the combat soldier it is also very expensive. For example, at the time of the Vietnam conflict the magazine unit price for the standard issue rifle was $1.50. The magazines were lost at a rate of about one million per month. This means an annual cost of about 18 million dollars. Based on this annual cost, development of an inexpensive, disposable magazine would be very desirable.
There are several other factors which make a disposable magazine desirable. The first is that such a magazine could be made of plastic. This would mean further savings because manufacturing costs would be less. Also components which have typically been parts of the magazine in conventional systems, could be designed into the rifle. In other words, the feed lips, follower, and follower spring would be built into the weapon itself, therefore, these components would not be thrown away with each magazine. Locating the feed lips within the weapon should also increase the reliability of feeding. This is because the feed lips can be made of higher quality material and located more precisely with respect to the weapon chamber. Also they would not be exposed and subject to deformation as is common with conventional magazines. Additionally by incorporating the aforementioned components into the weapon the magazine weight would be reduced. Since the soldier carries only one rifle but several magazines, the total load would be reduced.
These disposable magazines could also be factory machine loaded and sealed. This would assure optimum ammunition condition regardless of environmental conditions. This would eliminate the possibility of feeding bent or corroded ammunition which is a common cause of weapon malfunctions.